UPDATED Bran and Will are both heading off to uni. Their friendship has faltered, just as Will had planned, but as they start a new chapter in their lives, anything can happen... Especially when there's magic involved.

Disclaimer: Susan
Cooper graced the world with these characters, and we mortals may
only pick them up and play with them, putting them back gratefully
when we are done.

A/N: I miss writing
fanfiction, so I have decided to have another go. Please tell me if
it's crap, and I'll stop—otherwise I shall continue (I actually
have an idea of where this one is going). Yes, as others I have
written, it will be slash, though probably not for a while.

Chapter One: Where are
they now?

Bran
Davies could never quite shake the feeling that there was something
odd about him. Well, something other than his unnaturally pale
skin and hair and his glowing tawny eyes. He had long since gotten
used to those, and while people still gave him odd looks when they
thought he wasn't watching, at least the merciless teasing he had
been subjected to in primary school had faded away with time. And yet
there was something else, something that separated him from the rest
of his mates at school, even those who had known him long enough that
they no longer noticed his appearance as anything other than normal.

Oh,
give me a break, he told himself, dropping into the driver's
seat of his rather beat-up Saab. Different? Different my arse.
Insular is what you are. Antisocial, self-pitying,
holier-than-thou…But it would be different at uni, he
rationalised, pulling out of the library car park and heading out of
Tywyn. It had to be different. There would be others like him—others
who cared about learning and would get engaged in debates about
etymology, or Marx, or devolution. He would find true friends… Bran
had to cut off this train of thought as he manoeuvred around the
orange pylons marking off construction on the roundabout at the edge
of town. One of the road workers looked up as he passed, but Bran
paid him no mind, exiting the roundabout and setting off on the road
that led up into the hills toward home.

Will
Stanton sighed as he watched Bran pass. He had started periodically
checking in on the Welsh boy soon after his memories of their shared
adventures had been erased, but always like this, always in secret.
He was the cashier at the supermarket, a passer-by in the street.
Once, the previous year, he had interviewed Bran during the
university application process—it was the most personal contact
they had had in five years, and Bran didn't even know it was him.
Their friendship had become awkward after that fateful summer, and
had soon died away completely, just as Will had planned. And yet, he
still checked in, picking up whatever bits of information he could
about his former friend's life. It was infuriating sometimes, how
little he could learn in these brief encounters. It always left him
wanting to know more. He didn't even know where Bran had ended up
deciding to go to uni. But it was important for Will just to see, to
know that Bran was okay. He checked in on the others as well: John
Rowlands, his aunt and uncle, Stephen, and his other siblings as, one
by one, they left home. He felt responsible for them all.

Will's
own turn to leave home was fast approaching. He was going to Oxford
to study anthropology, and the part of him that was still an
eighteen-year-old boy was starting to get excited. He did, after all,
have many years ahead of him before his immortality would begin to
confront him with the inevitable painful questions, and for now, he
could enjoy the rich world of academia that he believed to be
embodied in Oxford University. Before that, though, you need to
get back to Buckinghamshire and feed the chickens, a voice in his
head reminded him. As he had discovered, no amount of toying with
time would enable him to bend the laws of cause and effect—as long
he did not feed the chickens, they would remain unfed, and he would
have to deal with one irate Alice Stanton. With another sigh, he lay
down his shovel and walked away, shimmering and vanishing as his
steps carried him home.

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